Six generations of family farming by the Muirs at Te Nihi Nihi in northern Waikato has led to a deep respect for the land, Gerald Piddock writes.

Farming and land stewardship is more than just about milk in the vat for Stuart Muir and Kim Jobson.

Muir is the fifth generation of his family to farm the land at Aka Aka in North Waikato. He can can trace his family back to when his Scottish ancestor Sandy settled on the land in the 1850s, droving cattle from the East Cape to the Auckland markets. . .

New rules introduced to protect Filipino workers from taking out huge loans to secure work in New Zealand are now being blamed for preventing those very people from landing jobs here.

Filipino Dairy Workers in New Zealand (FDWNZ) chairman Earl Magtiday said the rules, introduced by the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) late last year, could cost Kiwi employers up to $10,000 to recruit a single Filipino worker.

“Employers are not keen to pay out so much money, especially now the payout is low,” Earl Magtiday said. . .

A major change in the values driving consumer decisions means businesses have a choice about which side of the consumer fence they sit on, Massey University Business School’s Dr James Lockhart says.

Speaking at the 2016 Primary Industries Summit, Lockhart cited a Deloitte study, Capitalising on the Shifting Food Value Equation, that showed consumers are now split 50-50 into two groups – a traditional value group and an evolving value group. . .

AUSTRALIAN Dairy Farmers CEO Ben Stapley says milk processors could help ease immediate pressure on dairy farmers by announcing next season’s prices now but has stressed there’s no silver bullet solution to the current crisis.

Mr Stapley said the support package announced by the federal government with $555 million in dairy-specific concessional loans and other measures was a “really good starting point”. . .

FIVE years ago today, the ABC Four Corners program “A Bloody Business” exploded onto television screens throughout the nation, igniting a cataclysmic chain of events that catapulted Australia’s northern beef cattle industry into its deepest crisis.

Intertwined with vision also filmed by the ABC’s own investigation a month before, the expose zoomed-in on the gore and violence, to portray the live animal export trade as being systematically cruel and desperately needing government intervention to enact urgent reforms. . .